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Monday, 16 April 2012

Paint My House

^Impression of an Adzookie House

‘The colours of
marbles must relate as much as possible to the character of the subject. It
would be equally as absurd to use marbles in green, red, yellow or any other
brilliant colour for a mausoleum as it would be to use black marble on an
altar’.

- Abbe Laugier,
Essai sur l'Architecture, 1753.

With
this statement, French architectural theorist Abbe Laugier issued a call for
honesty in his influential treatise. ‘The artist must be able to justify by
reasons everything that he does’, preached the Jesuit priest. It was a sticky
doctrine that continues to feed off of architects’ anxieties today,
particularly when it comes to colour. One could speculate that the
colour-drought of the past decades, evidenced by the monochromatic tones of
glass, concrete and steel, is a consequence of our earnest search for honesty;
honesty as it relates to the technology available to us and to our ideals of
transparency.

Then,
in 2011 Godialing presented us with the most distilled form of honesty yet. The
California-based advertising company offered to pay 10 homeowners’ monthly
mortgage in exchange for having their houses painted with advertisements.

‘We’re looking
for houses to paint. In fact, paint is an understatement. We’re looking for homes
to turn into bill­boards. In exchange, we›ll pay your mortgage every month for
as long as your house remains painted’.

- Godialing
(formerly Adzookie), 2011

Additionally,
after a year, or whenever the owner decides they’ve had enough, the company
re-paints the house back to its original colour free of charge. By late
afternoon on its first day the ad received 1000 applica­tions, including one
from a church. At the time of writing there have been 33,000 applications and
counting.

If
we were to apply Laugier’s ideals here, the ‘character’ of a bankrupt home is
justifiably expressed in the crude tones of Facebook-blue and Braniacs-green.
Do these colours relate to the character of the subject? Yes. But it’s a
difficult pill for architects to swallow. We want so badly to be honest but the
as the threat of foreclosure continues to creep, relentlessly, through America,
England, Greece and Spain, the image of discordant symphonies of colours
bearing no relationship to one another or to the form on which they are painted
terrifies us.

So
we ask, do unpleasant truths such as the mortgage crisis qualify as an
appropriate driver for the way we colour our neighbourhoods, or are there
boundaries to honesty?

The
wonderful thing about colour is its capacity to tell stories. We want to choose
our colours based on our own definitions of honesty that express what we
opinionated people want to say. There is no room for story-telling in the
Godialing model; the story has already been told, painfully stripped of all
subjectivity. Like highlighters marking all the houses that should not, in a
perfect economic model, exist, the colours signal a broken system.

But
is that which is not honest automatically a lie? This is where the importance
of the word ‘character’ comes in. Although Laugier illustrated his belief with
an example intrinsic to his understanding of colour, he chose a word that seeks
specificity yet leaves enough room for interpretation, for the character of a
thing can appear differently to different people. Just as red to me can mean
green to you, through our quest for honesty we can (and should, now that
Adzookie has shown us what honesty can look like) continue to use colour to
tell our individual stories.